MEDICAL WEBSITE DESIGN

If you are a doctor or an office manager looking for professional help to either build a new website for your practice or refresh an existing website that is out of date, I’d love to have the opportunity to speak with you about your project.

My name is Scott Sisson, and I’ve been building and marketing business websites online and in multiple industries since 1996. In that time, I’ve worked with several pediatricians, ENTs, surgeons, cardiologists and even dentists who have built multiple websites through the years.

For 7 years in the corporate IT world, I managed both the public website as well as the internal intranet for a public mortgage company with almost 2,000 employees.

I worked with a team of web developers, database administrators, project managers and quality assurance testers to deliver websites and web applications to various department heads within the company each month.

Since 2007, I’ve been running my own web services consulting business and in that time I’ve seen many similarities with website projects no matter the size.

Small business owners and medical practices are a lot like those department heads who were tasked with building an effective website in addition to an already full plate.

I know how frustrating it can be to pull all the pieces together when it needs to be done and it’s the last thing on your mind most days.

Along Came Canned Web Builder Tools

Today, the website industry is full of “build-it-yourself” website tools. The primary problem with these tools, is that they only deliver a fraction of a truly effective website solution.

There is no content marketing plan, no market research for search phrase targeting or page mapping, no analytics reviews and assessment, no search campaign planning, just a handful of pages thrown together to create a low cost digital welcome mat with a logo….fun to look at but of little business use.

Read the reviews on some of these tools! It sounds a bit like bait and switch….low cost web site builders sound great at first when a new business or practice is on a tight budget.

However, as the practice grows, the doctor realizes that low cost tool didn’t buy much in terms of site speed or reliable tools for maintenance. Since you have your site locked into their proprietary system, what if they change their ongoing prices or features? Your hands are tied.

Just as desktop publishing boom of 1985 taught the business world, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should!

The true value in a web site building project is no longer about the physical building a site, it’s more about how that site is incorporated as a lead generating tool within a larger long term digital marketing plan for new business.

Our Very First Medical Website Design!

Though we’ve built LOTS of custom sites since 1997, our very first ‘medical’ site was for a practice called Beverly Hills Pediatrics. This was back in 2006, when Dr. Scott Cohen and Dr. Bess Raker were just getting started.

We built a small custom design site that was very popular for many years. I can’t tell you how many other doctors we talked with because they liked the message that design sent.

However, the site was a royal pain to maintain a few years later. Without getting into technical details, let’s just say that we had to have a specific type of software just to make changes.

Every external doctor or staff member who called us about this site seemed to convey the same message. “We just love the way the site looks and how clean it is, it really stands out!”

In fact, one pediatric cardiologist in Los Angeles liked the site so much he wanted one just like it…well, pretty darn close anyway.

So, with a few tweaks here and there, we finished a site in red that resembled this original one in blue and he was very happy with the finished product.

2015 BHP Medical Website Design Makeover Bumped Traffic over 200%

Times have changed as they seem to always do in our field. We still build lots of websites for small businesses including small medical practices. However, the tools we use are completely different than they were a few years ago.

The devices used to access websites are changing quickly now too. For our Beverly Hills Pediatrics website make over, we knew that mobile traffic was important (over 80% of its traffic is now from mobile devices) and that search engines would likely bump the new site in rankings but we had no idea the stark contrast we would see in visitor volume on a regular basis….over 200% in one month and still climbing in throughout 2016.

Using a tool that was both mobile friendly AND blog friendly suddenly grabbed search engine attention. However, the biggest change with any of the medical web sites projects we take is that now when a site is complete, our doctors and their staff can actually make simple updates themselves with only a browser!

There is no need to call and wait for us to update a phone number. We build our sites using the same content management system that our own site runs on. I can even update our site OR these client sites using an iPhone today. Talk about convenient.

In addition, there is no need to spend thousands in ‘custom medical website design’ because the sites we build for our clients today are what we call ‘theme’ based. This means that we can focus on the business & traffic building side of the site rather than going back and forth over each pixel placement as we did in the old days.

What’s more, we can make any ‘theme’ look pretty darn close to the original ‘custom’ site (or even better) without reinventing the wheel.

Take a look at the Beverly Hills Pediatrics site today. The layout is responsive, which means that it can stay clean and crisp while at the same time, adjusting to fit screens of any size down to an iPhone 5s or as large as a wide flat screen monitor.

Larger screens mean that we can add more great content. Now, instead of a graphics based navigation in the header, there is a lovely text based menu driven design that is easy to use and helps people get where they need to go.

Also, since the content now lives in a database the whole site is searchable from the top right hand corner of any page in the site! We couldn’t do this before…no easily anyway.

Another change that has helped drive search traffic is that all those ‘Medical Topic’ PDF sheets they initially loaded on the site have been converted to easily searchable HTML for Google. People can now find the site like never before.

From searches about bee stings to fever, vomiting to ear pain, parents visit the site using simple search engine searches and land on Beverly Hills Pediatrics.

The Great Website Migration

We are all in the same boat really, any small business or medical practice should be using his site to open doors, drive new business, be more visible! A small stale site that isn’t growing because it’s ‘too hard’ is simply not acceptable.

Get your site migrated into a content management system! We use WordPress, and life has been MUCH easier since we made the switch. Our doctors love their sites since moving into the WordPress framework and we think you will too!

Give us a call today (770) 298-7916 or fill out our FREE estimate form if you prefer. We can make the process of your medical website design migration simple and painless, for a lot less than $5k.

If you are just getting started with a new practice and would like some ball park pricing on a new medical website design type project, take a look at our WordPress site services page. We talk about the benefits as well as some sample price packages based on the number of pages you might be looking for!

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Scott's web services company has over 10 years helping small to medium-sized businesses establish an effective online presence using the internet. Over the years, we have built and ranked business sites ranging from professional consultants to corporate customers like Marriott and Chick-fil-A.

Scott has consistently provided superlative work in a very expedient manner, not only in the design and implementation of the web site, but also in making sure that my site can be easily found on all major search engines.

The service has been fantastic and our revenue growth has been well over 200% in our second year and expected to double that in our third year… We have been impressed with their ability to meet our needs and consistently deliver superior quality with the professionalism and record results… We are huge fans of the Sisson team!